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November 2021

When Will America Reach Peak Insanity?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/23/when-will-america-reach-peak-insanity/

It seems roughly half of the country is suffering from mass delusions. Either that or there is a willful effort to ignore the truth and spread lies for political reasons. Neither scenario bodes well for the country.

Our American sensibilities are assaulted on a daily basis with claims that are widely accepted to be true and righteous even though they’re demonstrably false and malign. The falsehoods, exaggerations, and prevarications by omission are tearing at the fabric of the great American experiment in liberty. Which is exactly what they are designed to do.

Consider the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, acquitted (justly) last week of the homicide and reckless endangerment charges that should have never been brought against him. Not only was the prosecution malicious (for which the prosecutors should be sued), the web of lies that corrupted the entire case were in service of a nefarious political agenda.

Rittenhouse did not kill two black men and wound another, as some media outlets claimed. The men he shot in self-defense were white. Nor could it be said the men were mere protesters, as so many asserted.

Rittenhouse was also called a white supremacist, even by I’ll-bring-the-country-together candidate Jeo Biden, though there’s no evidence that he is. It simply fit the narrative and that was good enough.

These examples are but surface coverage of the untruths politicians, the media and half-wit celebrities spread about Rittenhouse, because they saw the episode, from the self-defense shootings to the trial, as an opportunity to further demonize firearms and to make the streets safe for the “right” kind of protesting, which to the sane and decent among us is known as rioting by the left.

Meanwhile, the global warming lunacy continues to run free. No longer are the green shirts satisfied with replacing gasoline and diesel automobiles with electric cars, they want to get rid of cars altogether.

The Waukesha Rampage The suspected assailant was free on a $1,000 bond despite recent charges of violence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-waukesha-rampage-darrell-brooks-wisconsin-john-chisholm-11637622563?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

We’ll learn more in the coming days about the man who police say drove a red SUV through a crowd at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday, killing five and wounding at least 48. But based on what we already know, the awful rampage is likely to trigger a debate about rising crime and the progressive drive for bail reform and reduced incarceration.

Police say 39-year-old Darrell Brooks faces five counts of intentional homicide, and more lives are in jeopardy in area hospitals. The dead include members of the Dancing Grannies, a fixture at the annual parade and other Milwaukee-area events. Eighteen children were admitted to a local children’s hospital and trauma center, including 10 in intensive care.

Mr. Brooks has a long rap sheet, and the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office said Monday he had been out on a $1,000 bond after he allegedly tried to hit the mother of his child with his vehicle. He was arrested the same day and charged with obstructing an officer, endangering public safety, disorderly conduct, jumping bail and battery. Why was someone with that violent history released on such a minor bond?

The D.A.’s office said it is conducting an internal review of the bail decision, which sounds like ex post self-protection. “The state’s bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and pending charges against Mr. Brooks,” said the D.A.’s office in a statement. The Milwaukee County D.A is John Chisholm, a Democrat who readers may recall for his office’s unjustified pursuit of donors to former Gov. Scott Walker’s campaigns.

President Biden and American Gratitude Why hasn’t the White House announced a posthumous Medal of Honor for Alwyn Cashe yet? By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-and-american-gratitude-11637617891?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“We have nothing to announce at this time,” says White House National Security Council assistant press secretary Patrick Evans via email today on the potential scheduling of a Medal of Honor ceremony for American hero Alwyn Cashe. This Thanksgiving week President Joe Biden should express the thanks of a grateful nation and honor the memory of the courageous Cashe.

A year ago this column noted the amazing sacrifices Cashe made for his fellow soldiers while sustaining fatal burns in Iraq in 2005. Even while on fire, he pulled his wounded comrades out of a Bradley fighting vehicle under furious attack.

Once the Pentagon had learned the full story of his selfless actions, both houses of Congress acted by unanimous consent last year to make Cashe eligible for the Medal of Honor, which normally must be awarded within five years of the actions giving rise to the award. Then-President Donald Trump signed the law making Cashe eligible and the presentation was expected this year.

But now it’s late November and for some reason the expected presidential action still hasn’t occurred. Last month the Orlando Sentinel’s editorial board wrote:

The 16th anniversary of Alwyn Cashe’s heroism in Iraq came and went on Sunday… And yet, we’re still waiting for the Biden administration to get off its rear end and schedule a ceremony finally granting Cashe the honor he earned with his life.
… Raised in Seminole County, Cashe went straight from Oviedo High School to the U.S. Army in 1988. He served in the Gulf War and then in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Palestinian Jihad against Jews by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17958/palestinian-jihad-jews

If Palestinian leaders believe that Jews are not entitled to their holiest site, the Temple Mount, and that Jerusalem belongs only to Muslims and Christians, how can they talk about establishing a Palestinian state that would exist in peace and security next to Israel?

Western donors seem not to understand that the refusal by Palestinian leaders to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people remains a major obstacle to peace and the “two-state solution.”

“We categorically reject the Jewish state,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has stated on more than one occasion. “We will not backtrack on this matter.”

On the eve of the meeting of the donor countries, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh reminded Palestinians that there is no such thing as Jewish history in Jerusalem…. “Jerusalem has Canaanite, Roman, Islamic, and Christian antiquities, and no one else has any traces in it.”

This is the same Shtayyeh who days earlier told foreign journalists in Ramallah that the Palestinians have no problem with Jews.

Perhaps Shtayyeh thought that his remarks in Arabic during the PA cabinet meeting would not be translated or noticed by non-Arabic speakers.

On the same day the Western donors were meeting in Norway, the PA Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying that the Palestinians oppose visits to the Temple Mount by Jewish students.

The Norwegian foreign minister and the donor countries should have taken note of what Palestinian leaders are telling their people and the rest of the Arabs and Muslims about Israel and Jewish history. Had they paid attention to the words of the Palestinian leaders, they would have realized why it is impossible to achieve peace between the Palestinians and Israel at a time when the PA is openly saying that Jews have no right to live in their own homeland.

Western donors might wish to consider this Judenrein type of Palestinian anti-Semitism and incitement against Israel and Jews the next time they open their wallets to the PA.

As representatives of donor countries were meeting in Norway on November 17 to discuss providing financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Palestinian leaders were busy doing what they have perfected: denying Jewish history and inciting their people against Israel.

Denial of Jewish history and the delegitimization of Israel have long been an integral and major part of the rhetoric of Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian narrative. In the world of the Palestinians, Jews have no history in Jerusalem; they have never lived there, and the Jewish Temples never existed.

Suspect in Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack Identified By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/suspect-in-waukesha-christmas-parade-attack-identified/

A black male with a lengthy criminal rap sheet is in police custody in Waukesha, Wisconsin,  after an SUV plowed into Christmas parade on Sunday, resulting in multiple fatalities, and more than 20 people injured.

At least eleven adults and twelve children were transported to six area hospitals following the horrific vehicular attack.

According to Sandra Peterson, the communication director for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee,  a Catholic priest, multiple parishioners and Waukesha Catholic school children, were among the injured.

“Please join us in prayer for all those involved, their families, and those who are traumatized from witnessing the horrible scene,” Peterson said in a statement.

The suspect, Darrell E. Brooks, 39, is a registered sex offender, who was arrested several weeks ago for multiple felonies and misdemeanors, including domestic abuse, resisting or obstructing an officer, jumping bail, disorderly conduct, and battery, according to Wisconsin Circuit Court records.

The New Blue Confederacy  How did the New North become the Old South, and the New South the Old North? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/

Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?

Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?

Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?

In archetypical “states’ rights” fashion, blue-state “sanctuary cities” are as defiant of the federal government as the Old South was when it claimed immunity from federal jurisdiction—all the way from the nullification crisis of 1830-1833 to George Wallace in 1963 blocking the door at the University of Alabama.

Ask yourself: in the decades following the conclusion of the Civil War in April 1865, how might the reunited American public have answered the following hypothetical questions:

One-hundred-fifty-six years from now, in the year 2021, where in the United States will Americans most likely discriminate on the basis of race?

Where will citizens squabble over the racial percentages of ancestral bloodlines, and schools admit or reject students in part on the DNA of an applicant?

Where will free speech and expression become most endangered?

Where will states’ rights boosters deny federal officers the right to enforce federal law?

Where will the major cities be the most unsafe and the middle classes the most embattled? And from which regions of the country will people flee, and to which will they migrate?

Of course, in the century-and-a-half since the end of the Civil War, we have become in a certain sense a homogenizing country. Gender studies programs at, say, the University of Texas are not that much different from those at Yale. The same types of homeless are found in downtown Atlanta as well as in San Francisco.

Did Merrick Garland Commit Perjury? By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/did-merrick-garland-commit-perjury/

A ttorney General Merrick Garland has been shamefully disingenuous, with the public and Congress, regarding his mobilization of the FBI — under the guise of a nonexistent spate of violent attacks on public-school administrators — to harass and intimidate parents who are protesting against progressive indoctrination of their children. Garland’s October 4 memo on this subject was obviously the result of a Biden administration political gambit, in which the White House recruited progressive operatives of a school-board association to collaborate on a letter to the president, almost immediately after which Garland issued the memo that directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys’ offices to conduct investigations the federal government has no business conducting.

But did Garland go beyond the usual bobbing and weaving when confronted by Congress on the Biden administration’s threats? Did he commit perjury when he insisted that the government has not and would not employ anti-terrorism investigative measures against America’s parents?

Well, it depends on the meaning of “threat tag.”

In a letter to the attorney general on Tuesday, Congressman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, recounts Garland’s congressional testimony to the effect that the Justice Department and the FBI were not — as Jordan put it — “using counterterrorism statutes and resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings.” Jordan then quotes Garland’s assertion that he could not “imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor . . . a circumstance where they would be labeled domestic terrorists.”

By alluding to the Patriot Act here, the attorney general was referring to a set of investigative techniques that the FBI and Justice Department attorneys are permitted to use in counterterrorism investigations. Initially enacted 20 years ago, right after the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act empowers the FBI’s national-security agents to use many of the same tools that have long been available to the bureau’s criminal investigators — on analogous terms, which reflect that the principal task of the FBI’s National Security Branch (which used to be referred to as its Foreign Counterintelligence Division) is to safeguard the nation from the plots and machinations of terrorists and hostile foreign agents, not to investigate and prosecute criminal offenses.

China Loses Control of the Peng Shuai Narrative as the World Demands Answers: Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/21/china-loses-control-of-the-peng-shuai-narrative-as-the-world-demands-answers-n1535039

Peng Shuai, a world-class tennis player and Grand Slam doubles champion, is in the custody of the Chinese Communist government, and the world is demanding to know where she is.

Peng made serious and credible allegations of sexual assault against a high-ranking Chinese government official. The assault allegedly occurred three years ago. The online accusation was scrubbed, Peng was seized, and no one, except Communist lackeys in their state-controlled media, has seen or heard from her since she disappeared two weeks ago.

Nothing is guaranteed to make the Chinese Communists angrier than criticism of their policy of stifling internal dissent. Now, the entire world — not just the tennis community — has rallied to Peng’s cause.

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has promised to cancel all upcoming tournaments in China unless the Chinese show the world proof of life — and health. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is also mulling its options. China is scheduled to host the Winter Olympics this February and, while it’s extremely unlikely they would pull the event from Beijing, some kind of sanctions against Chinese athletes may be in the offing.

“If that’s not resolved in a sensible way very soon, it may spin out of control,” one IOC member told Reuters on Friday “Whether that escalates to a cessation of the Olympic Games, I doubt it. But you never know.”

Clearly, China has lost control of the narrative about Peng and will have a very difficult time maintaining its story. And if this is the best they have, they’re going to need some help.

Couple Flogged Publicly for Extramarital Affair in Sharia-Compliant Indonesia Crowds gathered to watch with great enthusiasm. Ashlyn Davis

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/couple-flogged-publicly-extramarital-affair-sharia-ashlyn-davis/

A man and a woman in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh city, on Wednesday, November 10, were given 17 lashes publicly for having an extramarital affair, which is a moral offense as per Sharia, which is enforced in the city. The man and the woman were individually brought into the area, which is features a gallery with rows of seats arranged to accommodate an audience that can witness this punishment. The accused were made to bow and then taken to a red carpet for the execution of the punishment. The Algojo, a Sharia police officer designated to carry out corporal punishments, dressed from head to toe in a brown robe with a white stripe running across it, with just two holes for his eyes, chose from three canes provided to strike the offenders.

The audience in the gallery was recording the punishment session. The woman was covered in a while burqa and wore a face mask for Covid-19 protocols. However, she dropped on the floor after being struck a few times, and was attended by the policemen and women standing nearby. The man, on the other hand, stood straight looking at the audience during his turn.

Though flogging is not an accepted means of punishment in Indonesia, it is still practiced widely and routinely in the ultra-conservative province Aceh; Banda Aceh is the capital city of Aceh. The province had been suffering from a separatist insurgency for many years. To quell the political unrest, the central government of Indonesia in 2001 granted Aceh provincial status. It was during this time that Aceh adopted the Islamic law of Sharia as the governing law of the province. Sharia would be implemented for any “crime” for which there was no provision in the secular penal code, for actions that went against the rules of Islam.

Any moral offense, such as like homosexuality, gambling, drinking alcohol, closeness between people of the opposite gender if not related or married, or public display of affection is eligible to be tried under Sharia.

Though in 2018, the Aceh Provincial Government in Indonesia decided to cease public flogging and both men and women sentenced to flogging would receive their punishment within the four walls of a prison, flogging in full public view continues to be practiced, and people gather to witness this brutality with great enthusiasm as well.

The disappearance of Peng Shuai By Rajan Laad

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_disappearance_of_peng_shuai.html

On November 2,  Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai in a Weibo post alleged that former Vice-President Zhang Gaoli had sexually assaulted her when they were in a relationship. Weibo is China’s state-run social media platform. Peng Shuai, 35, has won two Grand Slam women’s doubles titles, the first was at Wimbledon in 2013 and the second at the Roland Garros tournament in 2001. Zhang, 75, served as China’s Vice-President between 2013 and 2018 and is supposed to be a close ally of Chinese President Xi.

Peng Shuai claimed the intermittent affair with Zhang continued for years and on occasions the sex was consensual. She also acknowledged that she had no audio or video proof to back up her claims.

The post was removed twenty minutes later. Shuai has not been seen in public since then.

On November 14, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) Chairman and CEO Steve Simon said in a statement that they were still unable to establish contact with Shuai despite multiple attempts.

Fellow tennis players such as Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams also raised concerns.